It is the climbing of the mountain that makes the view from the top so breathtaking.”
–Richard C. Miller
action
Morning Trip (329)
“Why do you assume that an existence that does not succeed in taking root or bearing fruit in the form of a tangible work is less valuable than another? Why might not the world, which has need for stable families and settled people, need also these mobiles and wandering creatures whose action takes the form of series of seemingly unrelated trials or tests cutting across all kinds of areas?…We must, to a certain extent, look for a stable port, but if Life keeps tearing us away, not letting us settle anywhere, this in itself may be a call and a benediction.”
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Morning Trip (307)
“‘I want these people to experience beauty and prosperity. I want them to have it now. Not tomorrow, not in the future, but now, because their lives are short.’
‘If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.'”
–Ilona Andrews, Magic Binds
Morning Trip (283)
“I decided to start anew–to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown–no one to satisfy but myself. I began with coal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.”
–Georgia O’Keeffe
Morning Trip (277)
“The feelings of powerlessness that often accompany failure start with those all-too-familiar ‘could have’ or ‘should have’ self-inventories. And our fear grows in tandem with the strength of our belief that an opening has been forever closed. Pervasive feelings of powerlessness eventually lead to despair. My favorite definition of despair comes from the author and pastor Bob Bell: Despair is a spiritual condition. It’s the belief that tomorrow will be just like today. My heart stopped what I heard him say this. man. I know what it feels like to be under that rock and to believe, with all of my heart, that there’s no way out and that I’ll be in that exact same spot tomorrow. For me, that feeling is absolutely a spiritual crisis.
In my work, I’ve found that moving out of powerlessness, and even despair, requires hope. Hope is not an emotion: It’s a cognitive process–a thought process made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called the trilogy of ‘goals, pathways, and agency.’ Hope happens when we can set goals, have the tenacity and perseverance to pursue those goals, and believe in our own abilities to act.”
–Brene Brown
Morning Trip (263)
“Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant you a little grace, a grace that whispers, ‘This is part of the process. Stay the course.’ Experience doesn’t create even a single spark of light in the darkness of the middle space. It only instills in you a little bit of faith in your ability to navigate the dark. The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”
–Brene Brown, Rising Strong
Morning Trip (258)
“There’s nothing wrong with the world. What’s wrong is our way of looking at it.”
–Henry Miller
Morning Trip (254)
“Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.”
–Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness
Elisa's Spot 